How I manage books and summaries in Obsidian

This is a tutorial explaining how to manage books and summaries in Obsidian, including how to create a list and a gallery of books

My gallery of books in Obsidian

In this article, I explain how I now manage books and summaries in Obsidian. I discuss why I've switched from Goodreads to Obsidian, and why it's a great improvement to my Knowledge Management system.

Introduction

I've been a frustrated user of Goodreads for many years. Since they were acquired by Amazon, they've stopped evolving, and what once was an innovative web app became a dark corner of the Web.

Meanwhile, I've been using Obsidian more and more. It has already replaced many apps I was using previously. I've also started centralizing my book notes and summaries in Obsidian, and kept thinking about using metadata to track the books I want to read, those I'm busy reading, and those I've finished reading. Combining the library side with the summaries felt like a winning move.

I've now achieved my goal, and designed a cool system in Obsidian to track all my books and summaries. I've combined properties, plugins, and created a cool dashboard I can use to track my progress, and choose what to read next. I'll cover the implementation details in this post.

Now that it's there, all that I have left to do is to actually migrate library from Goodreads to Obsidian. And that might take a while... ;-)

PS: This system will soon be part of the Obsidian Starter Kit

Overview

Here's a quick overview of the solution:

The same information can also be seen as a data table:

To achieve this, I've combined: